Re: Memory management in Kernel 2.4.x

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 2002-05-27 at 14:45, Peter Wächtler wrote:
> There is still the oom killer (Out Of Memory).
> But it doesn't trigger and the machine pages "forever".
> Usually kswapd eats the CPU then, discarding and reloading pages,
> searching lists for pages to evict and so on.

On a -ac kernel with mode 2 or 3 set for overcommit you have to run out
of kernel resources to hang the box. It won't go OOM because it can't.
That wouldn't be a VM bug but a leak or poor handling of kernel
allocations somewhere. Sadly the changes needed to do that (beancounter
patch) were things Linus never accepted for 2.4